Multi-Homed & Highly Resilient IP Transit

We operate our own service under our own global ASN (50300)

Cost-effective, high capacity connectivity

Custodian offer IP Transit services not only from our flagship facility in Kent, but also from both Telehouse North and London Goswell road. Connections can be 10Mbps through to 10Gbps and can be combined with links back to your rack or office building. For further information on our network including uptime reports, peering lists and much more, visit our useful networking information page.

Our network is based entirely on Cisco hardware and has an extremely high level of resilience and diversity in both its physical and logical routing.

Very high capacity – no full transit edge ports are smaller than 10Gb

All backbone links are in multiples of 40Gb

All standard customer ports are 1Gbps, with 10Gbps ports now common

Fully IPv6 capable since 2009

Our multi-homed IP Transit service includes direct connections with no less than 7 full-transit providers. We also provide extensive peerings to other UK European ISPs via our direct connections to some of the world's largest public peering exchanges, including the largest two in the UK, and the largest in Europe. Our IP Transit is billed based on the 95th percentile.

IP (Internet Protocol) Transit is a service of allowing network traffic to cross a computer network to connect to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or the internet. IP is the primary protocol in the internet layer, and has the task of delivering packets from source to destination based on the IP addresses supplied by the source in the packet header.

Good IP Transit will have high levels of redundancy and provide low latencies. Using multiple providers and having a densely connected IP network allows ISPs to have the fastest and most reliable connections. Each server has its own IP address that acts as a unique identifier. Data can be sent across the internet in packets using the IP protocol.

The packets have 2 components; a header and a payload, with the header containing information such as the source IP address. This enables the receiving router to know where the information has come from. It also contains the destination IP address so the packet can be correctly routed along with other meta-data needed to send the packet to the correct location.

Ipv4 is the most common and first major version of IP protocol utilised, and is the dominant protocol of the internet. With the ever-growing demand of IP addresses, IPv6 has developed to support longer addresses, increasing the potential number of internet users with greater options for variation. At present only 5% of the internet traffic is carried over IPv6.

To be multi-homed to the internet using BGP routing protocol, a network must have its own public IP address range and a public Autonomous System (AS) number. Then connections to two (or more) separate ISPs are established. The routing over these connections is normally controlled by a BGP enabled router. ISPs use peering to improve transit.

Peering is when separate internet networks voluntarily interconnect to enable the exchanging of traffic between the users of each network. Multi-homed IP Transit enables internet traffic to be dynamically routed over multiple carriers' networks, guaranteeing all data has the optimum choice of routes across the internet. Full multi-homed IP Transit provides full failover access to all routes in the internet, so that if one route becomes unavailable, data can still arrive at its intended destination.